Tilting at Windmills

...M any people think it was lust dandy fo...

...Instead of reducing the number of television time outs, which is of course the main culprit, the league has adopted a policy that reduces the number of plays per game...

...Of the military options, I agree the naval blockade was the best choice...

...The fault is their sloth and the publishers’ penury...

...This winter they plan to pursue their studies at the Inter-Discipline Ski Conference at the Delta Mountain Inn in Whistler, British Columbia...

...This is why blacks had difficulty getting justice in cases in which their word had to be taken against whites in the Old South...

...Under the British system, the judge could have pointed out that when Mundy admitted in the closing argument that Barry had smoked crack on several occasions, he was in effect-as Mundy himself acknowledged to reporters outside the courtroomconceding the conspiracy charge against the mayor...

...They also share the presidential proclivity for jetting off to foreign capitals...

...But, once we’ve gotten the situation in Iraq under control, we can adopt a carbon tax that would accomplish the environmentalists’ aim that I, by the way, fully share...

...An interesting indication of the kind of value change that may be going on is that the owner of the Paramount is Ian Schraeger who was responsible for the renovation of the Royalton Hotel, which was one of the leading examples of expensive chic during the eighties...

...Thus many governors have helicopters at their disposal and security men to clear the way...

...The TV time outs are boring...

...Affluent publications should pay more for reviews...

...And among the married, recognition should be given to the cases-and we all know examples in modem marriages-in which the man is the one who does most of the caring for the child...

...It still appears to be the rule today...

...I had to walk a mile to school instead of driving or being driven...

...Cynical good guys...

...But in the past two years, Schaefer has been the standout, having managed, according to the Associated Press, to spend $600,000...

...In late July, when it appeared that Congress might finally put a stop to the scandal of subsidies for rich farmers, guess who came to the rescue of the wealthy...

...Bush to play with his golf cart and speedboat in cool and pleasant Kennebunkport while our troops were sweating in the miserable Arabian desert in August...

...1 know you’re wondering about the continuing education plans of those lawyers and doctors from Franklin County, Ohio...

...Tilting at Windmills Charles Peters why do today’s outfielders drop so-many catchable balls...

...Ninety-nine percent of book reviewers would not dream of doing this...

...I am not one of them...

...But I wonder if it makes sense...

...Could the explanation possibly lie in the modem outfielders’ disdain for using two hands to catch the ball...

...Producers have found a way to reduce the cost of screenplays by 50 percent...

...If a writer becomes angry, the producer says, “sue me,” figuring, according to the Los Angeles Times, that the writer will then settle for 50 cents on the dollar rather than blow most of his earnings on legal fees...

...The explanation came in early August when they were paid off by the Agriculture Committee with legislation that provided penalties for draining and planting wetlands and payments to farmers to take wetlands out of production...

...A glimpse into the realities of the legislative process was recently provided by a woman who managed the office of a California state senator...

...Why on earth would a single interview be worth praise...

...It’s because it was done as part of Rosenblatt’s preparation for writing a review of Moynihan’s new book for The New York Times...

...T here is a tendency among state officials to imitate their counterparts in Washington...

...The loss for 1989 appeared to be a relatively modest $88,538...

...If you ever saw that wonderful old movie about the sinking of the Titanic, the one with Clifton Webb and Barbara Stanwyck, you will recall the scene in the life boat filled with women and children in which the camera suddenly spies a pair of men’s shoes under a skirt...

...The problem is that the older you get, the more things you’ve seen go wrong...

...They refuse to pay their writers...

...See Alex Molnar, “If My Marine Son is Killed . . . ,” The New York Times, August 23...

...People as prejudiced as this are not going to be persuaded by their fellow jurors...

...By the way, the new NFL commissioner, Paul Tagliabue, seems to be a real disaster...

...We’ve praised William Seidman, the head of the FDIC, for suggesting that federal deposit insurance be limited to $100,000 per person rather than $100,000 per account...

...The only sizable groups of cases in which juries come to erroneous conclusions are when the community itself is wrong or when the opposing counsel are widely different in ability...

...Another triumph for our Cheap Chic campaign: Newsweek used the term in an August story about the newly renovated Paramount Hotel, where tasteful roomsNewsweek calls them “crisp and calming”-are available for $90 to $120 a night, which, if you’ve stayed in Manhattan recently, you know is a real bargain...

...She , testified that the senator asked her to keep track of legislation affecting groups that “weren’t appreciative,” meaning that they didn’t give him contributions, so that he could “get the attention” of the groups by, say, introducing legislation that was in conflict with their objectives and by asking their witnesses embarrassing questions during hearings...

...If the administration saw a real danger of an Iraqi invasion of Saudi Arabia, it could have threatened a retaliatory air attack of such severity that Saddam Hussein would know he would be the net loser...

...The plays are the runs and passes you want to see...

...If care-giving is the standard, then single women should fare no better than single men...

...Back to sports for a moment...

...The only surprise to me was that the jury was able to agree on one guilty and one innocent verdict...

...The new Air Force One has 85 telephones, 11 VCRs, seven bathrooms, and a presidential suite that includes a bedroom, dressing room, shower, private office, and conference room...

...But then Pincus discovered a key footnote that showed the budget did not include an additional $1.3 million covering other items such as salaries for the restaurant managers, repairs, maintenance, utilities, garbage disposal, and menu printing...

...W a l t e r Pincus, the veteran Washington Post reporter whose long experience has not left him unaware of the various hustles employed by those in power to conceal their perks, recently took a look at the cost of the Senate dining room...

...Why then do the trips entail such expenses as, in Schaefer’s case, $2,500 for opera tickets...

...Valerie Jackson-Warren, one of the Barry jurors, told The Washington Post that she believed the government was “out to get Marion Barry...

...But he replaced it with a 747 that would make Nero blush...

...Just to be sure you keep your nose in the books, the Inn offers a health club, a steam and exercise room, an outdoor heated pool and saunas, indoor tennis, a high speed gondola, and “an unforgettable panoramic view of the area which has the highest vertical rise of any in North America...

...The National Wildlife Federation and the National Audubon Society, both of which submitted letters to the House Agriculture Committee contending that it would be bad for the environment if the affluent farmers weren’t subsidized...

...Back then the woman-andchildrenfirst principle was accepted by almost everyone...

...Why did the environmentalists take such a dubious position...

...It seems that companies like Estee Lauder and Givenchy are putting out luxury items for children...

...Other than that parent, few voices were raised during August objecting to the administration’s rush to embrace the military options in the Middle East, the most dangerous of which was the introduction of ground forces that could easily mire us in a war that would be costly in terms of human life...

...And, whether you object to my proposal for environmental or other reasons, please don’t just say I’m wrong...

...The rule seems to make sense only if they are the primary care-givers for the children...

...But all this doesn’t mean the jury system is bad...

...Those who doubt the efficacy of gasoline rationing should know that during World War I1 it cut demand in halfeven though the economy was booming...

...They’re fun and exciting...

...I want to applaud Roger Rosenblatt for calling Pat Moynihan and interviewing him...

...leading consumer of oil, a 50 percent cut in our demand would dramatically reduce the world price of oil, and Saddam Hussein would gain nothing from his aggression...

...In both civil and criminal cases, this danger could be guarded against by a judge who intervenes to ask the questions and make the points that less able lawyers fail to see are crucial...

...They simply read and write about the book and think that that’s enough...

...Since we are by far the world’s George Bush did get rid of his gas-guzzling 707 last month...

...That’s why I suspected from the beginning that the Barry trial would result in a hung jury...

...The latter often happens when a rich person or corporation is on one side and a poor individual is on the other, or, as in the Barry case, when government lawyers of average ability are opposed by especially clever and experienced defense counsel such as R. Kenneth Mundy...

...But we wonder how he justifies a brochure put out by the FDIC that carefully explains how a husband, wife, and two children can have insured accounts totaling $1,400,000-in just one bank...

...The situation is so bad that I was surprised that even one parent had access to the editorial page of The New York Times...

...According to the office manager, the senator labeled pending legislation as either “money bills,” offering the potential of contributions from their sponsors or opponents, or “freebies,” in which he was not interested...

...Low cost oil would not encourage the development and use of low or nonpolluting fuels...

...Givenchy, for example, is offering a fragrance for kiddies called Tartine et Chocolat, priced at a mere $30 for 3.3 ounces...

...I n the wake of the Marion Barry verdict, a lot of intelligent people seemed to be in despair about the jury system...

...I’m indignant at what the National Football League is doing to shorten games...

...We have learned from the blockade during the Cuban missile crisis and the mining of Haiphong harbor, which brought the North Vietnamese to the peace table, that a military deployment that gives the other side the choice of avoiding or causing bloodshedby either complying with the blockade or having its ships blown out of the water-is likely to produce a reasonable response among our adversaries that does not involve loss of life...

...Perhaps those of you who are planning to write me about those dropped fly balls could include a few words of counsel on this matter as well...

...The more aware you are of the possible disaster inherent in any course you choose to take-other than staying in bed-the more apprehensive you become...

...These environmental reforms were doubtless desirable, but do they justify missing a chance to end the biggest outrage of the agriculture subsidy program...

...I marvel that so many of our leaders leap to embrace bloodthirsty ideas such as these while not even considering gasoline rationing, which would involve a modest sacrifice for the American people but not kill anyone and still deprive Saddam Hussein of the higher oil prices he sought through his conquest...

...I do not share their feelings...

...To me, the most maddening aspect of this episode was Bush’s contempt for criticism of his use of the the gas-guzzling speedboat while asking the nation to conserve energy...

...In early September, as this is being written, powerful figures such as Richard Lugar, the senior Republican on the Foreign Services Committee, and Les Aspin, the Democratic chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, are saying that getting rid of Saddam Hussein is worth 20,000-30,000 American casualties...

...The hope that has been stirred in my soul by the early success of our Cheap Chic campaign came close to being dashed when I happened to spot a story in the Los Angeles Times headlined “BigTicket Beauty Items for Children...

...On the whole, the jury system works...

...Instead, I find I’m becoming twitchier with each passing year...

...Today many blacks are wrong in believing, as we discussed in our last issue, that there is a white conspiracy to use the justice system against black public officials...

...Willie was less concerned with looking like a hot-shot by trying to snatch the ball with one hand than he was with actually catching it, which he did with both hands...

...If so, perhaps they should study newsreel footage of fabled catches of old, such as the one Willie Mays made on Vic Wertz in the 1954 World Series...

...So the real loss was $1,388,538, which was concealed in other congressional appropriations...

...Come up with a solution of your own that will honor, by doing our fair share, the remarkable international unity against Iraq’s aggression without denying the lessons of history by continuing to risk the slaughter of poor and unpriviledged Americans in another land war in Asia...

...Here’s the latest on the culture of Hollywood, which continues, alas, to be the nation’s leading dream merchant...

...One reason the influential class is so callous in this regard is that almost none of its sons and daughters are in the service...

...Not only is he responsible for the cutting-the-plays-instead-of-thecommercials policy, he has come close to lying in response to the revelations a local television reporter named Roberta Baskin has made about the NFL‘s inept drug policies...

...When I was practicing law, the jury reached the right verdict in every case in which I was involved...

...And we had to double date, but that probably had a salutary impact on adolescent behavior as passions were restrained by the presence of witnesses...

...No one questions it in the case of Iraqi hostages...

...But like democratic government it can fail when the people themselves are wrong on an issue related to the trial...

...The scandal of book reviewing is that not only do 99 percent of reviewers not do such interviews, 90 percent do no original research at all...

...Tied for second, at $200,000 each, were Governors Mabus of Mississippi and Schaefer of Maryland...

...The justification of these junkets is that the governors negotiate with foreign businessmen who might locate plants within their states...

...You be the judge...

...Yet there is no reason why interviewing could not be used to resolve doubts in a reviewer’s mind and make his review a better work...

...I had always hoped that age would make me calmer and more relaxed...

...Why should women go first...

...We couldn’t take pleasure trips by car...

...Conscientious reviewers should work harder...

...The main difference between baseball as it is played now and as it was when I was a boy in the thirties is that back then, even in the Class C Middle Atlantic League, fly balls were rarely dropped...

...I believe that with all my heart,” she added...

...You wanted to hiss at the coward...

...to chain himself to the White House because of 50 American hostages doesn’t make Bush wise to vacation in Maine as a major world crisis threatens the lives of thousands of Americans and Arabs...

...The resulting inconvenience was mild...

...One has to worry about how little influential Americans seemed concerned about this matter of loss of lives...

...Children first still seems fine, but the automatic assumption that women should go first does not seem to reflect the reality of sexual relationships in Western nations and most especially among Americans...

...The modem fielding glove seems clearly superior to the thin leather mitt used in the old days...

...She believed it so much that she argued in the jury room that a piece of crack used in evidence by the government was not actually crack, even though the point had not been made by the defense and therefore, as uncontested evidence, was not supposed to be doubted by the jury...

...I realize this solution is not likely to have immediate appeal for my liberal environmentalist friends...

...Just because Carter was a fool Of course, like Bush, the influential did interrupt their sojourns on the Vineyard or in the Hamptons long enough to get . back to Washington from time to time to go on talk shows or to write columns advocating militaristic policies that would further endanger our soldiers and sailors in the Middle East...

...Can someone explain this to me...

...But, a close second, which no one seems to notice, was his repeated use of Air Force One-and speaking of gas guzzlers, the Boeing 707 he was using in August is one of the great champions among the world’s aircraft-for repeated trips back to Washington as he tried to split the difference between the advisers who thought he ought to be seriously attending to business at the White House and those who argued that the rest of influential America was on vacation too...

...The champion traveler last year, according to City and State magazine, was Governor James R. Thompson of Illinois, whose trips cost $320,000...